Please take a moment to review the following interview (And YouTube Video) with Wes Clark about the failures of Katrina response and some steps involved to prepare ourselves in the future.
Nick Ballasy: With hurricane Katrina. How do you feel about the Bush administration’s response? Was it appropriate? Would you have done something totally different? Or..
Wes Clark: Well, there are a lot of things wrong with this and there’s plenty of fault finding at every level.
One of the things that happened, of course, that everybody knows about is the Federal Emergency Management Agency was slipped into the Department of Homeland Security and the focus was on terrorism, not on responding to natural disasters. So that was a distraction.
Another thing is, a lot of the key people were taken out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency because these were professional people and it became part of the political spoils. They put guys like Michael Brown, I’m sure he’s a decent guy, I don’t know him personally, but he had no experience for this kind of thing. It wasn’t like he was a, you know, big business leader who knew how to make things happen. He was a lawyer. And I like lawyers, but, unless you’ve run a big organization in a crisis, a disaster like Katrina is a tough.. It’s a tough learning experience and he didn’t do very well. And by the way, the guy over him, Michael Chertoff, he’s another lawyer who’s never, you know Federal Prosecuter, but he’d never actually had his hands on the wheel of a big organization. It’s about how you communicate, how you task, how you review, how you follow up, how you set suspenses and deadlines. It’s a whole lot of things that somebody in the military, for example, I mean, I’ve learned it throughout a thirty-four year career. I know how to do that kind of thing. James Lee Witt, down there helping the Governor of Louisiana, he learned it. He was a disaster manager in Arkansas before he ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
So there’s that problem.
Then we had a problem in the Pentagon too. We used to support the disasters out of the Pentagon. Let’s face it, I mean, the only real resources that can flow around are military resources. Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t have a fleet of helicopters standing by. It doesn’t have a thousand trucks, you know, with food that’s all loaded up to run in for every disaster. It tasks the military.
Now, we used to have something that was inside the Pentagon called the director of military support. It was run by the Secretary of the Army. But, organizational politics got in the way. Nobody could understand why the Army got to do all this disaster relief but the National Military Command Center, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, they didn’t. So people got jealous of the Secretary of the Army because nominally, he works for the Secretary of Defense, but in the case of a disaster he was working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And he was responding to the President. This made the Secretary of Defense feel like, “Uh, maybe I’m like, you know, I’m not needed here”. So, you know, any good bureaucratic warrior would tell you that you should take control of everything. So they took control of the domestic support agency, they folded it into the National Military Command Center and then, naturally, what’s the National Military Command Center, well, they’re fighting two wars. They’re fighting a war in Afghanistan and they’re fighting a war in Iraq and then you’re coming to them and saying “Hey, don’t forget that hurricane.” “Uh, yeah yeah, we’ll get to it right away, ok, and Sir by the way, there’s a hurricane coming.” “Yeah ok, well can you, The Secretary’s got an important meeting, can you come back and see him, you know, in a couple of hours.”
It’s not the same kind of responsiveness as if you have the Federal Emergency Management Agency connected directly to it’s own response cell in the Pentagon.
So those were some of the organizational mistakes, and leadership mistakes and.. choices. But when you get right down to it, to make something like this work you have to do a lot of rehearsal. People have to think through the problem. Somebody has to say “Well, gee we’re gonna have eighty thousand people with no transportation. Uh, let’s see eighty thousand, now, how many per bus? What’s our planning figure per bus? Forty. Forty, if you can get a big bus, forty. Ok, so let’s see, forty into eighty thousand. You need two thousand buses? Uh, but, uh, what’s the readiness rate on buses? Well, like one in ten won’t work. And one in ten might break down, how far they gotta go? I dunno, where we gonna put the refugees?”. So then you start, you know, trying to work your way backwards through this thing. Turns out you might need three thousand buses, with three thousand five hundred drivers, with extra tanker trucks, refueling stations because, what if it’s the middle of the night and the bus is out in the middle of Louisiana, you know, it gets, drove a hundred and fifty miles down, drove a hundred and fifty miles back, it’s got a two hundred mile range. It needs more fuel. So somebody has to think of all this, and to plan it. “Ok, what community, you got twenty buses, you got fifty buses, you got a hundred buses but you’re three hundred miles away.” So, I mean all that had to have been worked out. Where’re they gonna meet the buses? What neighborhood? What roads are gonna be flooded? Somebody has to do all that. None of that was done.
And then, when you ask for the buses, you know you’ve gotta have a sort of sequence ok. You ask for the buses and then somebody has to call each community. Do you know who to call? Who do you call? School board? Mayor? Chief of Police? Fire Department? “Um, ok but the Mayor’s office is closed.” Got a home number for the Mayor? And then, how bout the bus driver? How do you get the bus driver at two AM? And what percentage of them no longer have the same phone number that they had when they signed up for work five years ago? You know? Have you ever tried it? So, when you sort of work all through this thing it’s like.. It’s like doing line dancing. I don’t know if.. you ever do line dancing? My wife and I went out one time, this guy says, “Hey you’ve gotta learn this.” He’s big into country western music. He says, “You gotta learn this line dancing.” My wife got to the ninety second step, and she said, “I quit!” She said, “Any dance that’s got ninety-two steps, I’m not doing!” And, to make this kind of stuff work, you gotta go though a hundred and ninety-two steps. And they’ve gotta be thought out. Somebody’s got to be responsible for it, and, as soon as they come back and tell you the, you know, “We tried, we missed ten percent of the buses. Cause we couldn’t, you know these were the ones that..”. Somebody’s got to follow up and say, “Ok, get so and so on the phone, drive from this town to that town. Go to the parking lot for the buses. Get me backup drivers. I want National Guard. Break the padlock. Get into the buses. Start the buses.” You know, and, how are you going to do that with people who’ve never done it before?
Now, one more thing that’s worth talking about on Katrina of course, is, the National Guard leadership. Most of them were in Iraq. Both Mississippi and Louisiana have what they call an enhanced infantry brigade. And this brigade has the command and control apparatus. Usually it’s the major, let’s call it in technical terms, the maneuver arm for the state. So if you’ve got heavy lifting to be done, they’re going to do it. And they’re not the engineers that have bulldozers. They’re not the signal corps that has all the wire laying capability. And they’re not the aviators that have all the helicopters. But, these are the people that, if you want to organize something, they’re the people who do the organization and planning. They were in Iraq. Some of them had already participated in planning for disaster like this. So, somebody would’ve said, “Oh yeah, the bus problem! Yeah! Ok, remember when we did that in the exercise two years ago? How we..” You know..
But they weren’t there.
YouTube Link..
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By now, anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave these past years knows the critical importance that global climate change will have in trends toward more violent weather patterns and storms of significant risk to our vital National Security.